The American Library Association (ALA) Office for Information Technology Policy (OITP) and its Copyright Advisory Subcommittee issues the award to recognize work done in support of fair use and the public domain. The award is named after the late L. Ray Patterson, a copyright scholar and historian that left a lasting impression on the law of copyright, the public domain, and fair use.

Chair of the OITP Copyright Advisory Subcommittee Patrick Newell said, "Fred is a tireless advocate for openness of information and seeking the proper balance between intellectual property protection and the public interest in fair use, expression and innovation."

Yesterday, EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston testified before Congress, urging that the federal wiretapping law be updated to protect Americans against secret video surveillance just as it protects against covert electronic eavesdropping.

While researching a story for Wired Magazine about people who fake their own deaths, journalist Evan Ratliff began to wonder: How hard would it be to disappear in today's digital world? Email, online banking, mobile phones and other ubiquitous technologies leave traces of ourselves that can be easily tracked. If you wanted to disappear while using these tools, could you?

To find out the answer, he went underground himself, and issued a challenge to his readers: find Evan and win $5000. While continuing to use the Internet, mobile phones — and a variety of disguises — Evan managed to stay on the run for a total of 25 days before obsessive fans tracked him down in New Orleans. The whole story is documented in the fascinating piece he published in the December 2009 issue of Wired.

We are a bookish crowd here at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, so we figured it might be interesting to share a list of some of our favorite books. Choosing categories was a contentious process, but we ultimately decided to split up the list into the following rough categories:

In comments filed today, EFF, Public Knowledge, the American Association of Law Libraries, the Medical Library Association, the Special Libraries Association and U.S. PIRG urged the Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator (IPEC), Victoria Espinel, to pay careful attention to the various costs and benefits of different enforcement mechanisms and objectives, and spend public funds on IP enforcement only where the alleged violations will cause significant economic harm under clearly settled legal rules.

Today two computer security researchers, Christopher Soghoian and Sid Stamm, released a draft of a forthcoming research paper in which they present evidence that certificate authorities (CAs) may be cooperating with government agencies to help them spy undetected on "secure" encrypted communications. (EFF sometimes advises Soghoian on responsible disclosure issues, including for this paper.) More details and reporting are available at Wired today.

Making good on its promise to stop censoring results of its Chinese language website earlier this year, Google announced on Monday that its uncensored search services are now live. Chinese Internet users searching at google.cn are now redirected to google.com.hk, where its Chinese language results are delivered through its servers in Hong Kong. Google is also cleverly keeping public track of the availability of its services in China.

Interested in working with EFF or Tor, and getting paid for it by Google? If you are a student and a coder, then we have good news for you: A few of our projects have been accepted for Google's Summer Of Code 2010.